A New Way to Shell Peas (For Us)

We were blessed a couple of weeks ago by a gentleman at church.  He gave us a pea sheller that he was no longer using.  For years we've been shelling peas by hand.  I love shelling peas.  It is a relaxing, therapeutic endeavor that is guaranteed to reduce your blood pressure and pulse rate.  I don't know what it is about sitting down with a bushel of peas and a big bowl and shelling, but it puts you in a good frame of mind.  

Our new pea sheller is electric.  It is fast.  You turn it on and put the pea pod into the mouth of the machine.  The pod is pulled through two rubber rollers.  One roller is on a spring.  As the pulley turns the rollers and the pod is sucked through, the peas are popped out into a tray below and the empty shells are thrust into a separate tray.

I'm trying to figure out which tray your fingers go into if you aren't careful!  If I get careless and lose a a couple of digits, I want to make sure Tricia knows which tray to retrieve my fingers so she can sew them back on.  I kid, I kid.

Depending on the size of your peas, you can loosen the wing nuts and adjust the opening.  That's the safety device that keeps you from losing a finger or two.

Here's the empty pods being pushed through.  We'll put these into the compost pile.

And here are the results of our first experiment with our newfangled, super duty, Cummins diesel-powered, turbo-charged pea sheller.  (I may have embellished that description a bit.)  You can see the results look pretty decent.  

As I look over the shelled peas, I can pick out several different varieties: black-eyed peas, purple hulled peas, Ozark razorback peas, and whippoorwill peas.  That is a nice diversity of pea varieties, but it ushered in a problem.  I learned that you can only feed one variety in at a time.  They must be sorted by size and the rollers of the pea sheller must be adjusted for each variety.  This is done with a screwdriver.

If you don't do this, you'll either squash your bigger-sized peas like black-eyes and purple hulls OR the smaller peas like Ozark razorback and whippoorwills will pass right through and not be ejected by the rollers.  As with anything new, you learn from your mistakes.  Tricia put on a pot of white rice and cooked the peas with some smoked sausage and onions and the first peas shelled in our pea sheller have already been consumed.

With the test done, we're now prepared.  If we still have electricity, the new pea sheller will come in mighty handy.  If we lose power, the old, manual pea sheller (our hands) will get the job done as well!